She tried to stare Burton down. The guy hadn’t been under the bed, nor in any of the closets. Burton had examined all those spaces when he was sanitizing the room. He told her so in no uncertain terms.
Burton looked at the rope and then the open window. “Jesus, it was like the guy was watching us the whole time, knew right when we left the house.” Burton looked around for other possible bogeymen hovering nearby. His eyes rested on the mirror, then moved on, stopped and went back.
He looked down at the carpet in front of the mirror.
He had gone over that area repeatedly with the vacuum until it was smooth; the carpet nape, already plush and expensive, had been a good quarter inch thicker by the time he was finished. No one had walked there since they had come back into the room.
And yet
